Crazy Heart

Actor: Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart Actress: Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side Documentary short: "Music by Prudence" Animated short: "Logorama" Live action short: "The New Tenants"

1. Edge of Darkness . 1/2 (R) 2. Legion (R) 3 Daybreakers . (R) 4. Tooth Fairy 1/2 (PG) 5. It's Complicated . (R) 6. Avatar . 1/2 (PG-13) 7. Leap Year . (PG) 8. Crazy Heart . . (R) 9. Sherlock Holmes . (PG-13) 10. The Blind Side 1/2 (PG-13)

Hand the Oscar to Jeff Bridges right now, and let's be done with it. In Crazy Heart , a sublime American indie from writer/director Scott Cooper, Bridges is Bad Blake, a whiskey-soaked onetime country legend who still zags around the Southwest in his beat-up Chevy Suburban - with an empty gallon jug to pee in and a book of cheat sheets to hand to his pickup bands. As Crazy Heart opens, Bridges' Blake is zipping his fly and stumbling into the night's venue, a nowheresville bowling alley with a stage tucked in one corner.

Jeff Bridges has never won an Oscar, but that's only proof of what a good actor he is. I don't know that there's ever been a Hollywood actor less interested in playing to the camera, or more indifferent to whatever audience might exist beyond it. Most actors, certainly most stars, at some point reveal the volcanic ego that brought them to Hollywood, but Bridges, whose presence on movie sets was a birthright, seems no more impressed by...

"Get Low" is the kind of valedictory movie that a few lucky actors find at the end of a great career. In this case the actor is Robert Duvall (incredibly, he's nearly 80 years old), and it's good enough to make us hope, somehow, that Duvall has many more in store. Duvall is completely at home and in the zone in "Get Low" as Old Man Bush, a Great Depression hermit in the Georgia hills, shrouded in legend, who abruptly ends a life of seclusion and announces to stunned locals that he wants to pay for, and attend, his own funeral.

It could be a reality TV show: A divorced couple compete for prizes before an audience of millions. And that, in fact, is what's going to happen with James Cameron's Avatar and Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker each receiving nine nominations yesterday - including best picture and director - for the 82d Academy Awards. It's the battle of the exes. Bigelow, the former Mrs. Cameron, is only the fourth woman to be honored with a directing nomination by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

ACTORS WHO decide to make albums? Yuck! Unless you're a precocious teen talent on the Disney Channel or a theatrically schooled rapper, that actor-turned-singer thing is just not supposed to happen. "You don't buy fish from a dentist, or ask a plumber for financial advice, so why listen to an actor's music?" ruminates Hugh Laurie, the British emoter who disguises his accent well on the hit Fox TV series "House. " Now he's doing likewise on an aptly titled album of New Orleans blues classics, "Let Them Talk," to be unleashed on American ears Sept.

THE SPOILS of an epic Oscar war went to "The Hurt Locker," which won Best Picture last night by beating the world's most popular movie, "Avatar. " The movie won six awards in all (to "Avatar's" three). Kathryn Bigelow, who helmed the Iraq war drama "The Hurt Locker," became the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director (an award presented by Barbra Streisand). "There's no other way to describe it, it's the moment of a lifetime," said a tearful Bigelow, who dedicated the award "to the women and men in the military who risk their lives on a daily basis.

ACTORS WHO decide to make albums? Yuck! Unless you're a precocious teen talent on the Disney Channel or a theatrically schooled rapper, that actor-turned-singer thing is just not supposed to happen. "You don't buy fish from a dentist, or ask a plumber for financial advice, so why listen to an actor's music?" ruminates Hugh Laurie, the British emoter who disguises his accent well on the hit Fox TV series "House. " Now he's doing likewise on an aptly titled album of New Orleans blues classics, "Let Them Talk," to be unleashed on American ears Sept.

ONLY THE most disciplined movie critics will be able to make it all the way through a holiday movie preview this year without making a "Fockers" joke. Alas, I could not do it. "Little Fockers" got the best of me, and God help me when I have to post a review on Dec. 22 - when the movie opens opposite "Gulliver's Travels" and the Coen brothers' "True Grit," a movie assumed to be an Oscar front-runner even though nobody has seen it. And that's not even the biggest, most competitive date on the schedule.

M AGGIE Gyllenhall and Rupert Everett will star in "Hysteria," a comedy about the creation of the vibrator in Victorian era England, whose screenplay is based on a story by Daily News Tattle writer Howard Gensler . Tanya Wexler will direct the film, written by Stephen Dyer and Jonah Lisa Dyer centering on two London doctors, played by Hugh Dancy and Jonathan Pryce , who are treating women for irritability, anger...

"Get Low" is the kind of valedictory movie that a few lucky actors find at the end of a great career. In this case the actor is Robert Duvall (incredibly, he's nearly 80 years old), and it's good enough to make us hope, somehow, that Duvall has many more in store. Duvall is completely at home and in the zone in "Get Low" as Old Man Bush, a Great Depression hermit in the Georgia hills, shrouded in legend, who abruptly ends a life of seclusion and announces to stunned locals that he wants to pay for, and attend, his own funeral.

1. Edge of Darkness . 1/2 (R) 2. Legion (R) 3 Daybreakers . (R) 4. Tooth Fairy 1/2 (PG) 5. It's Complicated . (R) 6. Avatar . 1/2 (PG-13) 7. Leap Year . (PG) 8. Crazy Heart . . (R) 9. Sherlock Holmes . (PG-13) 10. The Blind Side 1/2 (PG-13)

Actor: Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart Actress: Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side Documentary short: "Music by Prudence" Animated short: "Logorama" Live action short: "The New Tenants"

THE SPOILS of an epic Oscar war went to "The Hurt Locker," which won Best Picture last night by beating the world's most popular movie, "Avatar. " The movie won six awards in all (to "Avatar's" three). Kathryn Bigelow, who helmed the Iraq war drama "The Hurt Locker," became the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director (an award presented by Barbra Streisand). "There's no other way to describe it, it's the moment of a lifetime," said a tearful Bigelow, who dedicated the award "to the women and men in the military who risk their lives on a daily basis.

It could be a reality TV show: A divorced couple compete for prizes before an audience of millions. And that, in fact, is what's going to happen with James Cameron's Avatar and Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker each receiving nine nominations yesterday - including best picture and director - for the 82d Academy Awards. It's the battle of the exes. Bigelow, the former Mrs. Cameron, is only the fourth woman to be honored with a directing nomination by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Hand the Oscar to Jeff Bridges right now, and let's be done with it. In Crazy Heart, a sublime American indie from writer/director Scott Cooper, Bridges is Bad Blake, a whiskey-soaked onetime country legend who still zags around the Southwest in his beat-up Chevy Suburban - with an empty gallon jug to pee in and a book of cheat sheets to hand to his pickup bands. As Crazy Heart opens, Bridges' Blake is zipping his fly and stumbling into the night's venue, a nowheresville bowling alley with a stage tucked in one corner.